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by Lechatelierite



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:00:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12826992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lechatelierite/pseuds/Lechatelierite
Summary: When the New Republic captured Grand Admiral Rae Sloane after the incident with the black hole, she fumed for a while at the irony of their sending someone she didn’t recognize to get her.





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When the New Republic captured Grand Admiral Rae Sloane after the incident with the black hole, she fumed for a while at the irony of their sending someone she didn’t recognize to get her. 

She swung the binders holding her hands together so that they bounced against the front of her knees. _Princess Leia, Mon Mothma, even Norra Wexley or her son —_ Sloane knew enough people in the New Republic that she could probably line some of them up with the First Order’s officers and be able to tell them apart by affect alone. None of those luminaries seemed available on this particular capital ship of Mon Calamari make, though, and the cell was as stark and cold as any in the First Order. The graceful lines of the hull did not extend to the brig. The hard bench under her was a bad chair and, she imagined with grim expectation, a much worse bed. 

She did not recognize the person they had sent to interrogate her. Two troopers waited outside the door with basters held tight against the chests of their ill-fitting uniforms, but the woman walked in without them, wearing a dress that bared her shoulders. 

Her voice was strong and resonant, tipping up into a breathy interrogative at the ends of her sentences. “Good day, Grand Admiral Sloane. I’ll remove those binders, if you don’t mind, although I encourage you not to move past those fine gentlebeings in the corridor.” 

Sloane raised her eyebrows, then tamped down the expression and raised her rattling cuffs. “By all means.”

The woman stabbed a key into the cuffs and caught them as they fell. “I’m Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo.”

“Vice Admiral.” Sloane met her eyes as Holdo stepped back. “I’m afraid I’ve caught you on a day without your blazes. Or are those optional for the New Republic now?”

Holdo had a birdlike grace, raising the binders in her thin fingers and tipping her head. “Oh, perhaps we should. We say that we fight for the freedom of everyone, but the military system is so designed to keep people clamoring for ranks …” 

She changed the subject before Sloane could decide whether or not she was serious. Sloane expected everything to be strange here, so it was hard for her to tell whether Holdo was _exceptionally_ free-wheeling or whether the New Republic was actually likely to dissolve their military ranks entirely. The coherence of their starfighter squadrons was certainly likely to suffer, which would be good for the First Order in the long run … 

“I’m sorry to hear about the debacle with the black hole,” Holdo said. 

Sloane pressed her lips more tightly together. If Holdo was trying to force her to reveal the location of the First Order’s exploratory beacons in the treacherous Unknown Regions, the unsubtle, flowery approach was not going to work. 

Holdo did not seem at all dissuaded by silence. “It’s so fortunate that you’ve come to us — such long odds couldn’t possibly have been chance! I think we’re meant to work together, Grand Admiral Sloane.”

“I believe you might have forgotten that our respective sovereignties are not speaking to one another.” The First Order did not have a strong enough fleet or enough people to run it — not yet. Sloane would have to be careful not to reveal exactly how far her plans had progressed, or the factions within the First Order that preferred other plans. The fleet was gestating, growing into something that might one day bring the order to the galaxy that the Empire had tried so hard to create. Sloane could wait. 

Holdo spread her hands. “There’s always a chance! What’s the likelihood that you’d end up here? Sometimes things change.” 

The likelihood of having taken a small ship on a scouting run and blundered into a New Republic fleet poised just far enough from a black hole to capture Sloane while she was trying to avoid the dangerous gravitic shoals? Not likely. Her frustration at her own situation latched onto a different part of Holdo’s speech. 

“People never change.” Sloane rested her head on her arm as if they were seated at a dining table instead in a cell. “You can try to convince them, but ultimately it’s physics. When an object starts moving it’s unlikely to stop.”

“Leia changed,” Holdo said.

Sloane looked up. “How so?”

Surely Holdo wasn’t _bargaining._ She didn’t seem the type. Would she just give out an anecdote about one of the most powerful people in the senate without seeing it as a card in a deck? Although of course, there were more aspects of debate than bargaining. Sloane reminded herself that the entire gist of the conversation had been to get her to join the New Republic; a ruse to unlikely that Sloane had almost forgotten that they would try it. The Rebellion had always been known for persisting in their naiveté for an impossibly long time; having Luke Skywalker at the vanguard was proof of that. How long had Sloane been in this cell? 

“When I first met her, I think she wasn’t entirely aware of how unusual her life was,” Holdo said. Her eyes unfocused, as if she was concentrating so hard on such a distant memory that she needed to replace its image with the present one. “She didn’t have any friends her age. She talked like an adult, but more than that — like someone who didn’t know how to let go and experience her own power.” 

“Wait. How old were you when you met?”

“Oh, fourteen,” Holdo said. 

_Before the destruction of Alderaan._ Back when Sloane was in training, perhaps before the one instance in which she caught Darth Vader’s eye. 

“Do you really want to work for the First Order?” Holdo changed the subject abruptly, but she seemed genuinely curious. “I’ve heard that you believe in … well, I won’t say the principles of the Empire. But the First Order kidnaps _children._ ”

Sloane kept her hands carefully folded in her lap. “Order. Discipline. Peace. It is not the First Order that has prevented these things in the galaxy, Vice Admiral Holdo. The New Republic staggers under theocrats and …” _and whatever you are_ , she did not say. “…struggles to feed its people.” 

It was a guess, but the dark look that passed across Holdo’s face told Sloane that it was a good one. The New Republic had not unified its planets thoroughly enough yet to arrange supply lines to its volunteer troops. Just like the Rebellion. 

Holdo waved a graceful hand as if acknowledging that although Sloane had been right, supply lines were not the most immediate concern. “Right now, we need your help here.” 

Why ever would Sloane want to give it? Maybe they planned to kill her if she didn’t cooperate, but that didn’t seem like it would fit with the New Republic’s self-congratulatory moralizing. 

“The Unknown Regions are full of strange things. Creatures bigger and more mysterious than purrgils, unmapped labyrinths of space dust; some people even say they hear voices through the walls out here,” Holdo said. Her sing-song voice was suited to the list of mysteries. 

The First Order had hosted all of those rumors too. People in Sloane’s fleet had enough discipline not to voice them. 

“That black hole that knocked your ship off course? We need to navigate around it, but it appears to … create smaller ones, perhaps? Our sensors are baffled. You know your way around here.”

Maybe that was why it had been so difficult to navigate. “I do,” Sloane said. “And what is my reward, if I help you?”

“We let you go on a mostly habitable planet where you can call for assistance. And you don’t fall into a black hole with us.”

That was hard to turn down. Had they been edging carefully around the phenomena all the while she was here, fuming in a cell? Sloane steeled her expression. “I don’t imagine Leia would like trading back an enemy officer.”

“If you do this correctly, it won’t be Leia’s call.”

Maybe Holdo was lying. Rae couldn’t read whether the serene expression on her face was a sabacc mask or an indication that Holdo didn’t actually feel they were in very much danger. 

“Show me,” Sloane said. 

Holdo kept her eyes on Sloane and the binders in hand as she lead the way across the cell. Once in the curving, pearlescent corridor outside she handed the binders to a sour-faced Twi’lek soldier. Instead of giving her orders, though, Holdo turned to Sloane. 

“This is Lieutenant Kietsara. She’ll be walking with us.”

The Twi’lek nodded as if it had indeed been an order, her purple lekku bobbing. She waited for Sloane to pass by before walking behind them, her blaster held conspicuously across her chest. The second guard, a male Nikto, silently followed. Holdo walked ahead of Sloane, apparently unconcerned about the possibility of an attack even though Sloane did not see the telltale bumps of a blaster hidden under Holdo’s flowing dress. It wouldn’t do much good to strike Holdo now anyway, not with the guards behind and an entire ship meeting in a stormy region of space around them. If Holdo was telling the truth, Sloane would have to help them navigate the strange region before she could consider escape. 

Meanwhile, she observed as much as she could of what the New Republic had become since the foundation of the First Order. The Mon Calamari cruiser could have been from the Civil War for all Sloane knew; technology had changed little in the intervening decades. What had changed was the number of troops loyal to either cause, and the organization thereof. Holdo’s procession passed other holding cells, closed but unguarded. Perhaps Sloane was the ship’s only prisoner. As they moved further into the working areas of the ship she saw soldiers going about their business, each looking bright-eyed and well-fed. Rae’s own ships, full of tumbling children who could not yet grasp the great destiny for which they had been saved, might one day be like this. For now, there was some shame in seeing people so organized, so apparently happy even in a time of ship-wide crisis. Sloane kept her expression neutral.

On the bridge, people were not so serene. Navigation officers, many of them Mon Calamari, clustered around a raised control area while the other officers across the wide bridge exuded nervousness. The large durasteel screen at the front of the room showed a view cut through and mangled by the threads of material swirling into the black hole. In front of this view sat the Mon Calamari captain, who nodded at Holdo when she stepped inside. What had once been a star was now consuming belts of rubble around them, turning what might once have been its planets into superheated debris. It had been beautiful to skate around, the hull of her ship glowing as if for re-entry even though the whole wide expanse of space was in front of her.

Sloane had gone to scout the way ahead, yes, to show a path for the First Order capital ship that had then cloaked and sped away when she had sent it a signal to do so. She could have sent a trooper instead, but she had wanted the freedom and the silence for a while.

The Mon Calamari nearest to her stopped talking and gave her a stony stare. Realization followed for the others, until it seemed like everyone in the bridge was looking at her. Sloane raised her chin, then glanced at Holdo. If the vice admiral was not going to announce her, she would announce herself. 

“Let her through,” Holdo said kindly to the techs. “You’ll remember Grand Admiral Sloane, whom we picked up.”

“Murderer!” A male voice shouted from below. Rae couldn’t see where exactly the speaker stood. 

Holdo raised her voice only slightly. “She can help us through the black hole field. Let her see only what she needs.” 

Sloane heard several echoes, several variants on _what she needs_ , including from the techs beside her. The New Republic’s magnanimity so quickly revealed itself to be a sham. She looked at the Mon Calamari, staring down one eye and then the other. “As many sensor screens as you have, please. This way we might all get out of here alive.” 

Holdo stood back, forcing Sloane to stand between the bristling techs. As soon as she saw the screen, though, she registered the danger that the ship was in. She had circled around the other side of the black hole in her scout ship, so she had not seen the way the rocks from the broken planets warped space over here. Maybe the planets had had strange properties even before the black hole had formed. Now, they were interacting with it like bubbles in a glass of water, clinging to the other sources of gravity. Little spots of nothingness popped and broke on the screen.

“Is this real time?” she asked the nearest tech, a human slightly shorter than the looming Mon Cals. 

“Three minutes behind,” she answered immediately. 

That wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t good, either. “I came from this direction.” She traced her finger in an arc across the screen. “If we move between here and here, galactic northeast and following _this_ axis, you should have a buffer of safe passage between _this_ anomaly and the black hole itself.”

“What if it changes between now and then?” The tech said.

“I scanned this region as I was approaching. We should have at least a twenty minute window.” _We._ Sloane scowled. She trusted her own knowledge of the area, though, and if this woman thought she knew better … 

The New Republic navigator didn’t argue further. Maybe it was because Holdo was waiting patiently behind them, or because their sensors had surely indicated that Sloane’s ship had come from that area not very long ago, she began talking to the Mon Calamari and inputting coordinates. Holdo touched Sloane on the shoulder and drew her away from the console. Kietsara looking nervous at the proximity and the crowd. Whether because she picked up on that nervousness or because she needed her own room to work, Holdo maneuvered Sloane into Keitsara’s orbit. The Twi’lek gestured for Sloane to stand against the wall while the ship began to power up and progress slowly into the black hole field. 

The first few minutes of travel were tense and boring. Space on the starboard side was darker and less tumultuous than on port and would just become more so as they passed the last gravitic anomaly. Sloane folded her arms. 

Then red lights started to erupt on the control boards. The techs and the captain remained calm, the techs muttering to one another and shifting to look at the maps while the captain occasionally spoke into her comm. If Sloane was going to die here, who would she blame? The New Republic was most at fault, but Sloane herself had left her fleet because she had felt that she had needed to be separate from it for a while. Had she felt out of place in her own empire, Brendol Hux’s scheming finally starting to press at her? Holdo stood beside the navigation station, as still and calm as the surface of a lake. Occasionally she glanced at the sensor screens and then, satisfied with whatever she read there, resumed her contemplation.

The light of the black hole system slowly faded, then was cut off from sight beyond the curve of the graceful viewports. Indicators began to switch back from red to green, and navigators sighed and stretched tense hands. 

Holdo turned to Sloane. “And so we do not die today! And we have you to thank, Grand Admiral.” 

Should Sloane respond to this? She thought that her task had been more than enough acknowledgement of their temporary alliance to speak for itself. It had been this way when she had decided that Norra and Brentin Wexley were better allies than enemies, too, when the Empire had become something Sloane could not recognize. Could she recognize this, this organized display of skill and trust? Holdo ran a fine ship. If she was exploring out here in the Unknown Regions as well, and had gotten used enough to the strangeness of the area to get this far, she could stumble upon the First Order exactly as Sloane did not want her to do. 

If Holdo expected a polite response back she did not indicate it. “I think falling into a black hole would have been an exciting route to take,” Holdo said as Keitsara began to gesture for Sloane to leave the bridge. “Few people can say they have done that.”

Sloane raised an eyebrow at Holdo. 

“Maybe even none,” Holdo said. 

“About our deal,” Rae said. “I want a proper habitable planet. I’ll look at the scans before you drop me off.” 

“Of course. Keitsara will escort you to a shuttle.”

The door to the bridge had closed behind them, leaving the three women in the cold corridor. Sloane could wrestle the blaster away from Kietsara, maybe. Would Holdo fight? She looked thin. That plan didn’t promise Sloane a brighter future, though, not when the entire ship would mobilize against her. 

“That is,” Holdo said, “if you still want to go.”

“What?”

“You did a good thing for us. I think you were in that little scout ship because you needed time to think about things. Sometimes people just need to see the world, the stars and the black holes and even the ruined planets. We could give you some time.”

She _had_ felt trapped. Hux and his obnoxious son would turn all of those children into not just soldiers but carbon copies of themselves, new clones for a new era of cold eyes and loyalty to nothing but the labyrinths of oddities in the Unknown Regions, and _was_ that the Empire Sloane had wanted for herself? 

She knew that she did not want to fly the flag of Leia Organa’s New Republic either, much less that coward Mon Mothma. She could knock Kietsara to the ground right now, just to make the point —  

“I’ll take some time,” Rae said.

Holdo nodded with a seriousness that looked like it took some effort. A smile twitched around the corners of her mouth. 

“So get that blaster away from me,” Rae snapped at Kietsara aside, and the Twi’lek’s expression soured further.

“One thing at a time, Grand Admiral,” Holdo said, and lead her toward a side corridor with a viewport bubble set into the iridescent walls. “There is a nice nebula this way.” 

 


End file.
